A suicide scandal in Shanghai reveals the social fault lines of democratic visions in China’s troubled Republic in the early 1920s.

On September 8, 1922, the body of Xi Shangzhen was found hanging in the Shanghai newspaper office where she worked. Although her death occurred outside of Chinese jurisdiction, her US-educated employer, Tang Jiezhi, was kidnapped by Chinese authorities and put on trial. In the unfolding scandal, novelists, filmmakers, suffragists, reformers, and even a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party seized upon the case as emblematic of deep social problems. Xi’s family claimed that Tang had pressured her to be his concubine; his conviction instead for financial fraud only stirred further controversy.

The creation of a republic ten years earlier had inspired a vision of popular sovereignty and citizenship premised upon gender equality and legal reform. After the quick suppression of the first Chinese parliament, commercial circles took up the banner of democracy in their pursuit of wealth. But, Bryna Goodman shows, the suicide of an educated “new woman” exposed the emptiness of republican democracy after a flash of speculative finance gripped the city. In the shadow of economic crisis, Tang’s trial also exposed the frailty of legal mechanisms in a political landscape fragmented by warlords and enclaves of foreign colonial rule.

The Suicide of Miss Xi opens a window onto how urban Chinese in the early twentieth century navigated China’s early passage through democratic populism, in an ill-fated moment of possibility between empire and party dictatorship. Xi Shangzhen became a symbol of the failures of the Chinese Republic as well as the broken promises of citizen’s rights, gender equality, and financial prosperity betokened by liberal democracy and capitalism.

"A fascinating and thoughtful analysis of the changing mores of a turbulent but lively period—the early 1920s—in China…The Suicide of Miss Xi is brilliantly written…Some of the pressures on Miss Xi have eerie echoes in today’s China." - The Telegraph (India)

"Makes a critical contribution by bringing the economy, market, and capitalism into our understanding of May Fourth politics…[A] rich, nuanced, and engaging book, which reflects both an experienced historian’s deep thinking on modern Chinese history and a comprehensive dialogue with previous scholarship." - Journal of Asian Studies

"Compelling…A rich analysis of 1920s China and its fragile democracy…An invaluable contribution to the literature on the early Chinese republic as she masterfully weaves together an analysis of gender, legal, and economic perspectives…Remarkable in its breadth and depth, Goodman’s study is a significant addition to a growing literature on the early republican era that explores changing notions of citizenship and of the republic itself." - Journal of Social History

"A remarkably rich and thought-provoking microanalysis of early Republican Shanghai…Goodman challenges us to reread May Fourth lives and fault lines and to rethink the sources and challenges of democratic quests in the past and present…[A] must-read book." - Twentieth-Century China

"As its title indicates, this book is about the suicide of Xi Shangzhen…This forgotten event, which Bryna Goodman recovered from extensive archival research, provides a prism through which to understand urban society in Republican China during the late 1910s and early 1920s…Despite the deep engagement with existing histories and theories, Goodman manages to keep the voices of the protagonists at the center of her compelling narrative." - Nan Nü